Ice

by Ed McBain

  “Yeah,” Eileen said, grinning.

  “Good thing, too,” Brown said. “This kind of weather, lady needs her underdrawers.” He began laughing. Eileen laughed, too. Kling sat staring through the windshield.

  “Will you be all right on the subway, this hour of the night?” Brown asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Eileen said.

  He pulled the car into the curb.

  “You sure now?”

  “Positive. G’night, Artie,” she said, and opened the door. “G’night, Bert.”

  “Good night,” Brown said. “Take care.”

  Kling said nothing. Eileen shrugged and closed the door behind her. Brown watched as she went down the steps into the subway. He pulled the car away from the curb the moment her head disappeared from sight.

  “What was that address again?” he asked Kling.

  “1114 Silvermine,” Kling said.

  “That near the Oval?”

  “Few blocks west.”

  There were two patrol cars parked at the curb when Brown pulled in. Their dome lights were flashing blue and red into the falling snow. Kling and Brown got out of the car, had a brief conversation with the patrolman who’d been left at the sidewalk to keep an eye on both cars (the theft of police cars not being unheard of in this city), and then walked down the ramp into the underground garage. The place was lighted with sodium lamps. The three patrolmen from the cars upstairs were standing around a man lying on the cement floor some eight feet from the elevator. The elevator door was red. The man’s blood flowed from his open skull toward the matching red elevator door.

  “Detective Brown,” Brown said. “My partner, Detective Kling.”

  “Right,” one of the patrolmen said, and nodded.

  “Who was the first car on the scene?”

  “We were,” another patrolman said. “Boy Car.”

  “Anybody down here when you arrived?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody?” Kling said. “Who called it in? Who found the body?”

  “Don’t know, sir,” the patrolman said. “Dispatcher radioed us a Ten-Ten—investigate shots fired. We didn’t even know where we were supposed to look, they just gave us the address. So we asked the guy in the lobby, the security guard there, did he call 911 to report a man with a gun, and he said no, he didn’t. So we looked around the building and also the backyard, and we were about to call it back as a Ten-Ninety, when Benny here, he says, ‘Let’s check out the garage under the building.’ By that time, Charlie Car was here—”

  “We’d been checking out an alarm on Ainsley,” one of the other patrolmen said.

  “So the three of us come down here together,” the first patrolman said.

  “And there he is,” the third patrolman said, nodding toward the body on the floor.

  “Has Homicide been informed?” Kling asked.

  “I guess so,” the first patrolman said.

  “What do you mean, you guess so?”

  “I gave it to the desk sergeant as a DOA. It ain’t my responsibility to inform Homicide.”

  “Who’s talkin’ about Homicide behind our backs?” a voice from the top of the ramp said.

  “Speak of the devil,” Brown said.

  It was rare that Homicide detectives—or any detectives, for that matter—worked as triples, but the three men who came down the ramp now, advancing as steadily as Sherman tanks, were known throughout the city as the Holy Trinity, and it was rumored that they never did anything except as a trio. Their names were Hardigan, Hanrahan, and Mandelbaum. It occurred to Brown that he had never learned their first names. It further occurred to him that he had never learned the first name of any Homicide detective. Did Homicide detectives have first names? The three detectives were all wearing black. Homicide detectives in this city favored black. There was a rumor afoot that the stylistic trend had been started years back by a very famous Homicide dick. Brown’s surmise was a much simpler one: Homicide cops dealt exclusively with corpses; they were only wearing the colors of mourning. It occurred to him that Genero had begun wearing a lot of black lately; was Genero hoping for a transfer to Homicide? It further occurred to him that nobody in the squadroom ever called Genero by his first name, which was Richard. It was always, “Come here, Genero” or—more likely—“Go away, Genero.” Occasionally, he was called Genero the Asshole, the way an ancient king might have been dubbed affectionately Amos the Simple or Herman the Rat. If Homicide cops had no first names, and if Genero had a first name no one ever used, then perhaps Genero might one day enjoy a successful career with the Homicide Division. Brown devoutly hoped so.

  “This here the victim here?” Hardigan asked.

  “No, this here is a paper doily here,” Brown said.

  “I forgot I was dealing with the Eight-Seven,” Hardigan said.

  “Comedians,” Hanrahan said.

  “Morons,” Mandelbaum said. “Two o’clock in the morning.”

  “We get you out of your little beddie?” Brown asked.

  “Shove it up your ass,” Mandelbaum said pleasantly.

  “In spades,” Hardigan said, and Brown wondered if he was making a racist remark.

  “Who is he?” Hanrahan asked.

  “We haven’t tossed him yet,” Kling said.

  “So do it,” Hanrahan said.

  “Not until the ME’s finished with him.”

  “Who says?”

  “New regs—only a year old already.”

  “Hell with the regs, we’ll freeze out here waiting for the ME here. This is Saturday night, you know how many people are getting themselves killed out there tonight?”

  “How many?” Kling said.

  “Toss him. Do what I tell you. This is Homicide here,” Hanrahan said.

  “Put it in writing,” Kling said. “That I should toss him before the ME pronounces him dead.”

  “You can see he’s dead, can’t you? What do you need? The man’s got no face left, why do you need an ME to tell you he’s dead?” Hardigan said, backing his partner.

  “Then you toss him,” Brown said, backing his partner.

  “Okay, we’ll wait for the ME, okay?” Hanrahan said.

  “We’ll freeze down here waiting for the ME, okay?” Mandelbaum said.

  “Will that make you guys happy?” Hardigan said.

  Neither Brown nor Kling answered.

  The ME did not arrive until almost 3:00 A.M. By that time the Mobile Crime Unit was on the scene doing everything they could do without touching the body itself. The boys from the Photo Unit were taking their pictures, and the CRIME SCENE signs were up, and Brown and Kling were making their drawings, and everybody was freezing to death but nobody had yet come to pronounce the stiff (very literally stiff) dead. The ME made a grand entrance, striding down the ramp like a stand-up burlesque comic ready to pitch popcorn and prizes.

  “Sorry to be late, gentlemen,” he said, and Hardigan farted.

  The ME bent over the corpse. He unbuttoned the corpse’s overcoat. The first thing all of them saw was the corpse’s hand clutched around the butt of a pistol in a holster.

  “Well, well,” Hanrahan said.

  With some difficulty, the ME unbuttoned the man’s plaid jacket. He was about to slide his stethoscope under the man’s vest and then under his shirt and onto his chest, the better to determine that the bullets pumped into his face had caused his heart to cease functioning, when he noticed—as did the five detectives and the three patrolmen and the photographer and the two lab technicians—that the man’s vest had perhaps a dozen pockets sewn into it.

  “Last time I saw that was on a pickpocket,” Mandelbaum said. “Had all these pockets on his vest, used to drop stolen goods in them.”

  The man was not a pickpocket.

  Not unless he’d been very fortunate that day.

  As soon as the ME was finished with him (and he was indeed dead), they went through all those little pockets sewn into his vest. And in each one of those little pockets, the
y found little plastic packets. And in each one of those little plastic packets, they found diamonds of various sizes and shapes.

  “The guy’s a walking jewelry store,” Hardigan said.

  “Only he ain’t walking no more,” Hanrahan said.

  “Look at all that ice, willya?” Mandelbaum said.

  They had promised only snow, but by morning the snow had changed to sleet and then to freezing rain, and the streets were dangerously slick. Carella almost slipped on his way to the subway, catching his balance a moment before he flew into the air. His mother had told him two atrocity stories when he was a child, and both of them had remained with him into his adult years. The first had to do with his Uncle Charlie, whom he’d never met, who had accidentally blinded himself in one eye with the point of a scissors while trying to trim his eyebrows. Carella occasionally had his eyebrows trimmed in a barber shop, but never did he attempt that dangerous task himself. His mother had also told him how his Uncle Salvatore had slipped on the ice outside his haberdashery in Calm’s Point, and landed on his back, which was why he was confined to a wheelchair. Whenever Carella spotted a patch of ice on a sidewalk or a road, he walked or drove over it very, very carefully.

  Carella had known (and incidentally had loved) his Uncle Salvatore, and whenever his uncle asked him why he didn’t wear a hat, Carella felt a bit guilty. “You should wear a hat,” his uncle said. “If you don’t wear a hat, forty percent of your body heat escapes from your head, and you feel cold all over.” Carella did not like hats. He told his uncle he did not like hats. His uncle tapped his temple with his forefinger. “Pazzo,” he said, which meant “crazy” in Italian. It was Carella’s uncle who’d told him the only haberdashery joke he’d ever heard in his life. “A man walks into a haberdashery,” his uncle said. “The haberdasherer comes over to him and says, ‘Yes, sir, do you have anything in mind?’ The man says, ‘I have pussy in mind, but let me see a hat.’ ” Carella was sixteen years old when his uncle told him that story. They were in his uncle’s haberdashery, which he was still running from a wheelchair. He died three years later.

  It took Carella two hours to get to work that morning. He spent the time on the subway trying to figure out what he would buy Teddy for Valentine’s Day—which was today, a Sunday, when most of the city’s shops would be closed. He had expected to pick up something yesterday, but that was before he’d inherited the Sally Anderson homicide. Teddy had told him at breakfast this morning, a secretive smile on her mouth, her hands flashing, that she would be getting him his gift sometime this afternoon, and would present it to him tonight when he got home from work. He told her there was no rush; despite the makeshift Presidents’ Day holiday tomorrow, many of the stores would be open, and besides, the roads would be cleared and sanded by then. Teddy told him she’d already made the appointment. An appointment for what? he wondered.

  Meyer Meyer was wearing his Valentine’s Day present.

  His Valentine’s Day present was a woolen watch cap that would have caused Carella’s Uncle Salvatore to beam with pride. Meyer’s wife Sarah had knitted the watch cap herself. It was a white cap with a border of linked red hearts. Meyer was marching around the squadroom with the hat pulled down over his ears, showing it off.

  “You can hardly tell you’re bald with that hat,” Tack Fujiwara said, and noticed Carella coming through the gate in the railing. “Hello, cousin,” he said.

  “Oh-hi-oh,” Carella said.

  “What do you mean ‘hardly’?” Meyer said. “Do I look bald?” he asked Carella.

  “You look hairy,” Carella said. “Where’d you get that hat?”

  “Sarah made it. For Valentine’s Day.”

  “Very nice,” Carella said. “Is the Loot in?”

  “Ten minutes ago,” Fujiwara said. “What’d you get for Valentine’s Day?”

  “A murder,” Carella said.

  “Shake hands with Kling,” Fujiwara said, but Carella was already knocking on the lieutenant’s door, and he didn’t catch the words.

  “Come!” Byrnes shouted.

  Carella opened the door. The lieutenant was sitting behind his desk studying the open lid of a box of candy. “Hello, Steve,” he said. “This chart tells you what each piece of candy in the box is. Would you like a piece of candy?”

  “Thanks, Pete, no,” Carella said.

  Byrnes kept studying the chart, running his finger over it. He was a compact man with a head of thinning iron gray hair, flinty blue eyes, and a craggy nose that had been broken with a lead pipe when he was still a patrolman in Majesta, but that had miraculously knitted itself together without any trace of the injury save a faintly visible scar across the bridge. No one ever noticed the scar except when Byrnes touched it, as he sometimes did during a particularly knotty skull session in his office. He was touching it now as he studied the varied selection promised by the chart on the inside lid of the candy box.

  “My Valentine’s present,” he said, fingering the scar on his nose, studying the list of goodies to be sampled.

  “I’ll be getting mine tonight,” Carella said, feeling somehow defensive.

  “So have some candy now,” Byrnes said, and plucked a square-shaped piece of chocolate from the box. “The square ones are always caramels,” he said. “I don’t need a chart to tell me this is a caramel.” He bit into it. “See?” he said, smiling and chewing. “Good, too. Have one,” he said, and shoved the box across his desk.

  “Pete, we’ve got a hundred fourteen people to track down,” Carella said. “That’s how many people are in the Fatback company, and that’s how many people Meyer and I have got to question if we’re going to get any kind of a lead on this dead dancer.”

  “What’s her connection with this Lopez character?” Byrnes asked, chewing.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Dope?” Byrnes asked.

  “Not that we know. The lab’s checking.”

  “Was he her boyfriend or something?”

  “No, her boyfriend is a med student at Ramsey.”

  “Where was he when the girl was cashing it in?”

  “Home studying.”

  “Who says?”

  “He says.”

  “Check it.”

  “We will. Meanwhile, Pete—”

  “Let me guess,” Byrnes said. “You sure you don’t want one of these?” he said, and took another chocolate from the box.

  “Thanks,” Carella said, and shook his head.

  “Meanwhile,” Byrnes said, “I’m trying to guess what you want from me.”

  “Triple us,” Carella said.

  “Who’d you have in mind?”

  “Bert Kling.”

  “Bert’s got headaches of his own just now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He caught a homicide last night.”

  “Well, that takes care of that,” Carella said. “Who can you spare?”

  “Who said I can spare anybody?”

  “Pete, this girl is all over the newspapers.”

  “So what?”

  “She’ll be making news as long as that show runs…and that’ll be forever.”

  “So what?”

  “So how long do you think it’ll be before the Chief of Detectives picks up the telephone and gives you a little jingle? ‘Hello, Pete, about this dancer? In that big hit musical? Any leads yet, Pete? Lots of reporters calling here, Pete. What are your boys doing up there, Pete, besides sitting on their duffs while people go around shooting other people?’ “

  Byrnes looked at him.

  “Never mind the Chief of Detectives,” he said. “The Chief of Detectives doesn’t have to come to work up here every day, the Chief of Detectives has a nice big corner office in the Headquarters Building downtown. And if the Chief of Detectives thinks we’re moving too slowly on this one, then maybe we ought to remind him it wasn’t even ours to begin with, the girl was shot and killed in Midtown East, if the Chief of Detectives would like to know, and not up here in the
Eight-Seven. What we have as our very own up here is the murder of a crumby little gram dealer, if that would interest the Chief of Detectives, though I doubt he could care less. Now if you want to make your request to me on the basis of something sensible, Steve, like how talking to a hundred fourteen people—are there really that many people attached to that show?”

  “A hundred fourteen, yes.”

  “If you want to come to me and tell me it’ll take you and Meyer a week, ten days, two weeks, however long to question all hundred fourteen of those people while a murderer is running around out there with a gun in his hand, if you want to present your case sensibly and logically and not threaten me with what the Chief of Detectives is going to think—”

  “Okay, Pete, how’s this?” Carella said, smiling. “It’s going to take Meyer and me at least ten days to question all those people while a murderer is running around out there with a gun in his hand. We can cut the working time to maybe five days, unless we hit pay dirt before then, so all I’m asking for is one other man on the case, triple us up, Pete, and turn us loose out there. Okay? Who can you spare?”

  “Nobody,” Byrnes said.

  She tried to remember how long ago it had been. Years and years, that was certain. And would he think her frivolous now? Would he accept what she had done (what she was about to do, actually, since she hadn’t yet done it, and could still change her mind about it) as the gift she intended it to be, or would he consider it the self-indulgent whim of a woman who was no longer the young girl he’d married years and years ago? Well, who is? Teddy thought. Even Jane Fonda is no longer the young girl she was years and years ago. But does Jane Fonda worry about such things? Probably, Teddy thought.

  The section of the city through which she walked was thronged with people, but Teddy could not hear the drifting snatches of their conversations as they moved past her and around her. Their exhaled breaths pluming on the brittle air were, to her, only empty cartoon balloons floating past in a silent rush. She walked in an oddly hushed world, dangerous to her in that her ears could provide no timely warnings, curiously exquisite in that whatever she saw was unaccompanied by any sound that might have marred its beauty. The sight (and aroma) of a bluish-gray cloud of carbon monoxide, billowing onto the silvery air from an automobile exhaust pipe, assumed dreamlike proportions when it was not coupled with the harsh mechanical sound of an automobile engine. The uniformed cop on the corner, waving his arms this way and that, artfully dodging as he directed the cross-purposed stream of lumbering traffic, became an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a skilled mime the moment one did not have to hear his bellowed, “Move it, let’s keep it moving!” And yet—